The House by the Thames (33 page)

In essence, this was just the same sort of confrontation as had taken place in the 1830s, between those who wanted to restore St Saviour's and those who jeered at them as ‘refined gentlemen belonging to the gothic interest' and wanted the place pulled down.

As had happened a decade before during the Globe saga, when ‘the ordinary people of Southwark', who had been invoked so often in the past as a pretext for municipal vandalism, were asked in the 1990s if they wanted the building kept and turned into a gallery, they said yes. Southwark contributed a substantial sum of money. The footbridge idea was re-launched, and at last built to a design by Norman Foster. Today, the whole complex has proved popular beyond anyone's expectations, and for the first time in centuries the Southwark shore seems to have been drawn near again to the centre of London.

This had been an aspiration for a long time. When the Waterloo Bridge was built, the idea of colonising Lambeth Marsh as an integrated part of London was in people's minds, and the same effect was hoped for thirty years later when Waterloo station began to be built. Neither construction really achieved this end, and nor did the deliberate siting of the 1920s County Hall on the Surrey shore. ‘South London' remained obstinately other: it was even said to have its own accent. In 1951 the Festival of Britain site, at Waterloo, brought large numbers of outsiders to that part of London for the first time, but it was regarded as an oasis of light and futuristic fun in a nowhere of blitzed townscape ‘ripe for removal' (Abercrombie language). Similarly, when the South Bank arts complex began to go up on the ex-Festival site, it continued to be perceived as an outpost of London proper, fortunately accessible by an
ad hoc
plank footbridge stuck to the side of Hungerford railway bridge, rather than in a wider London context.

Even when the walkway was constructed all along the shoreline from Lambeth to below London Bridge, for a while much of it was little used. Around 1990, I often had occasion to walk up river along Bankside in the late afternoon. Once London Bridge, with its newly converted Hay's Wharf was passed, old London, vestigial London, set in. Borough Market, by Southwark Cathedral, seemed to be in decline – a process today, happily, reversed. In Clink Street, my feet trod deserted cobbles. Like Grace Golden in the 1920s, the Stevensons in the 1930s and the Worsthornes in the 1950s, I felt I was venturing into an unknown land.

Now people walk by the river morning, noon and night, and there are new cafés and restaurants in abundance. The great change has not been due to any structured plan. It has been pointed out to me, by someone who has spent a lifetime observing London, that all the earlier attempts to draw the Surrey shore into the metropolis were official attempts, or at any rate conscious schemes to that end undertaken by public bodies. Yet what has finally made the whole hazy vision of regeneration coalesce at last into working reality has been the two quirky projects which would never have seen the light had it not been for the enthusiasm and determination of a few dynamic individuals. I refer, of course, to the Globe and to the Tate Modern.

People like them. And, because they like them, they come to Bankside and wander along, and then they prolong their stroll, under Blackfriars Bridge and towards the previously isolated South Bank Centre, and so eateries have sprung up to serve them. And, at the South Bank Centre, human serendipity has again played a role, for though the concrete buildings are wretchedly unattractive externally, by today's more glamorous standards, the otherwise pointless underpass of the Hayward–Queen Elizabeth structure has proved a haven for skateboarders. Similarly, the immovable bulk of Waterloo Bridge, which appeared a tiresome obstacle on the Festival of Britain site and again when the arts complex came to be built, has turned out a haphazard advantage. One span of the bridge makes a ready-made space, outdoor but sheltered from the rain, for the National Film Theatre café and for the stalls of book-sellers. The ‘pleasure ground' that V. S. Pritchett hinted at in 1962, like the historical tours that Walter Besant fantasised about in 1889, has come about.

It is, however, far too early to assess this take-over of the Surrey shore by arts-and-heritage concerns. Will this prove a long-lasting enhancement of London life? Or will it, along with that fragile south-sea bubble known as ‘the tourist industry', seem to our descendants to have been a relatively brief Indian summer before the setting in of a new economic Great Frost? Will future slumps, wars, global disasters make the early years of the twenty-first century on Bankside appear a time of luxury preoccupations and lotus-eating innocence? Or will our great-great-grandchildren be grateful to us that we saved and conserved and re-created attractive buildings, even as we are grateful to those who conserved the last vestiges of the Archbishop's palace or the George inn, or stopped the railway viaducts from strangling St Saviour's entirely. And grateful, of course, to those who saved the house at Cardinal's Wharf from disappearing into rubble, splintered wood and plaster dust like almost all its fellows.

After Guy Munthe's departure, 49 Bankside was sold on twice more. Today, neither slum nor rich man's palace, it is safe and well cared for in private hands. The high, creeper-covered wall of the neighbouring warehouse, the rest of which has been pulled down to accommodate the ancillary buildings of the Globe, still shelters its hidden garden on the east side. On the west side, Cardinal Cap Alley still runs towards the one-time Skin Market, but the right-of-way has been effectively lost, either during the Globe building works, which occupied a large part of the Skin Market, or when the Midland Bank built a computer centre on another part of it. The ancient alley is currently a dead-end, and to avoid what are politely called ‘nuisances', the present owners of number 49 have put a locked gate across it at Bankside. You cannot walk into the past that way.

To the east of the Globe, a procession of new blocks of flats and offices, twinkling with lights at night, line the river, just as they do now down the Rotherhithe reach and across the water at Wapping and on many other stretches. The social geography of several boroughs, including Southwark, has been turned back to front. What were originally the ‘mean streets' and ‘dark dirty alleys' of waterside Thames are now extremely expensive real-estate, a cosmopolitan ribbon worlds away from the drab hinterlands behind them. In this ribbon, 49 Bankside, with its old-fashioned lamp, stands at night like a forgotten cottage in a children's story.

Below the raised walkway and the fairylike Millennium Bridge, the dark tides come and go as ever, now largely unregarded. Here and there, at the sites of a few of the old water stairs, concrete steps descend to the river floor, but they are little used. Sometimes, when the water at Bankside is very low, it uncovers the foundations of ancient wooden jetties, places where boats tied up on the gravelly strand before the Cardinal's Hat was even rebuilt into number 49. Every so often another find – a handmade nail, a copper coin, the sole of a medieval leather shoe – is dredged from the mud where it has been lying while generations came and went above.

London Bridge, as ever, is one of the busiest, in spite of all the others that have been built to relieve it. Every weekday morning a great tide of people comes out from the railway station and flows across it to the City, and every evening the same tide goes back again. ‘
I had not thought
,' wrote T. S. Eliot of them, echoing Dante, ‘
that death had undone so many
.'

Since he wrote that, another eighty years of London workers have passed into the dark. They have joined the Browkers, Henslowes and Taylors, the Fritters, Shalletts, Thrales, Hornes, Sells and all the others who have briefly walked through these pages, along with the innumerable unnamed poor. When I am crossing London Bridge one winter evening my male companion is accosted by another man, with the gaunt face of an old labourer – ‘Can you give me something, Sir? It's a very cold night.' The voice, the manner, does not seem so much that of a modern beggar as to belong to a long, long line of earlier, shadowy figures on the bridge at this spot.

In a house that was part of a new street in fields north of the City when the railway viaducts were cutting across the old lanes of Bankside, I am moving about in the kitchen. The young child on an upper floor of the house is in my charge: a baby-alarm speaker stands on a shelf. At first, I just hear the faint snuffles and thumps of a cot-sleeper settling to rest. Then a silence. Then, out of the air, it seems, out of a dateless past, comes a small, clear voice singing:

The song was old already when the first of the Sells children were growing up within sight of the old bridge. An earlier version of it was already current when Hugh Browker rebuilt the Cardinal's Hat, and when the fish ponds were made, and even when old London Bridge itself was built at the end of the twelfth century. Its earliest origins date back to the destruction of a wooden bridge by the Vikings, two generations before the Norman Conquest.

I like to think that small children will still be singing about London Bridge, and even that the house on Bankside will still be standing, long after I have joined the crowds walking away into the unknown.